This Blog Is Not For Reading

A blog, just like any blog, only more so

  • Subscribe

  • Categories

  • RSS Bob Jonkman’s Microblog

    • Delete 27 August 2023
      Bob Jonkman deleted notice {{tag:gs.jonkman.ca,2023-08-27:noticeId=1114720:objectType=note}}.
    • New note by bobjonkman 3 August 2023
      From a few years ago... All gone now, and I promised $SPOUSE it would never come back. https://gs.jonkman.ca/attachment/221480
    • Favorite 3 August 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by clacke: I tried for over four decades to grow an impressive personality, but it was a lot of effort and not much payoff, so now I'm just trying to grow an impressive beard instead.
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by clacke 3 August 2023
      RT @clacke I tried for over four decades to grow an impressive personality, but it was a lot of effort and not much payoff, so now I'm just trying to grow an impressive beard instead.
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by clacke 27 July 2023
      RT @clacke did you watch Oppenheimer, the film about the moral implications of the things we create, starring an actor who also played a Gotham City psychiatrist who went insaneordid you watch Barbie, the film about the moral implications of the things we create, starring an actress who also played a Gotham City psychiatrist who […]
    • Favorite 27 July 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by clacke: did you watch Oppenheimer, the film about the moral implications of the things we create, starring an actor who also played a Gotham City psychiatrist who went insaneordid you watch Barbie, the film about the moral implications of the things we create, starring an actress who also played a Gotham […]
    • New comment by bobjonkman 29 June 2023
      @steve Wait, you or Dr. Cooley are at Perimeter? Giving any public lectures? If so, I'll hop on my bike to attend! @Perimeter
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by steve 29 June 2023
      RT @steve From jodi on Mastodon: I’m looking forward to meeting students at TRISEP 2023 being held @Perimeter!
    • New note by bobjonkman 8 June 2023
      Several other authors of software that accesses the Twitter API have come to that conclusion as well. When #Twidere, my phone app to access Twitter stopped accessing Twitter back in January I pretty much abandoned Twitter. I still check Twitter with its WebUI, less than once a week, but I no longer post or engage […]
    • Favorite 8 June 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by steve: I finally had a chance to figure out why my social bridging software was no longer able to talk to Twitter. Indeed, it's because under Twitter's new leadership, python-twitter has been deemed as violating something in their terms of service. It says I can submit a ticket, but they make […]

OpenDataDay Hackathon at Kwartzlab

Posted by Bob Jonkman on 27th February 2013

Open Data Waterloo Region

 

On International OpenDataDay four teams of hackers from OpenDataWR gathered at Kwartzlab to work on Food Premise Inspection Data, modelling new transit routes and route changes with GTFS data, improving the server for the Catchr transit app, a proof-of-concept pushbutton app for Android, and creating a Get Map button for OpenStreetMap in the Thunderbird Lightning add-in.


Hackers at Kwartzlab OpenDataDay Hackathon at Kwartzlab. Clockwise: Koo (back to camera), Ralph, Michael, Mike, Brett, Jonathan. Missing: Darcy, William, Katherine, Bob.

 

William and I worked on the Get Map button. Although we had hoped to create some working code, we got only as far as making a mock-up of Lightning’s Edit Event screen:

Screenshot of Thunderbird Lightning Edit Event screen
Lightning “Edit Event” screen, showing the new “Get Map” button

 

The first hurdle we ran into is that Lightning source code is kept in a Mercurial repository. Although William was familiar with Perforce (another code revision system), I haven’t used Mercurial until now. And the repository contained all of Thunderbird, Firefox, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla addins. We certainly didn’t want to clone the entire Mozilla code base! So William found the Lightning tarball, which I unpacked in a new folder. This let us poke around the source files to find where our new code should go.

Then we found that Lightning isn’t straight Javascript, it’s mostly XUL. XUL is close enough to XHTML, CSS and DTD files that we could figure out what needed to be done. But we had a limited amount of time, and I didn’t want to spend it waiting for source code to build. So I created a new profile in Thunderbird, installed a fresh copy of the Lightning add-in, and we hacked at the installed files directly. This gave us instant feedback on the changes we made, just by restarting Thunderbird and running Lightning. Some of the changes were in plain text files, but others needed to be made to files in JAR format. One of those was the localized language file. We weren’t sure which language file we were using, en-GB or en-US. Of course, we picked the wrong one to start with, and spend maybe two hours trying to debug a misleading error message about a missing entity definition while we were working on the wrong file.

But it all turned out OK in the end. Now we need to take the work we did on the installed files and replicate it on the source files from the Mercurial repository, properly build Lightning from source, and offer our changes to the Mozilla Calendar project. And, once we’ve got it working, we’ll make the changes available on this site too.

–Bob and William.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in code, FLOSS, Open Data, Software | Comments Off on OpenDataDay Hackathon at Kwartzlab

 
Better Tag Cloud